The TERMES Project

Nature provides us with impressive examples of
animal construction: many species of termites build complex mounds
several orders of magnitude larger than themselves. Yet the individual
architects and engineers are small, expendable, and seem to operate
with with little to no centralized supervision. Social termites
provide an inspiration for the design of a swarm construction system,
where many autonomous robots cooperatively build large-scale
structures. Human construction traditionally involves direct human
operation of tools and equipment, careful preplanning, and little or
no true automation. Bringing automation to construction has the
potential to improve measures like its speed and efficiency, as well
as enabling construction in settings where it is difficult or
dangerous for humans to work, e.g., disaster areas or extraterrestrial
environments.

Inspired by termites and their building activities,
our goal in the TERMES project is to develop a swarm
construction system in which robots cooperate to build 3D structures
much larger than themselves. The current hardware system
consists of simple but autonomous mobile robots and specialized
passive blocks; the robot is able to manipulate blocks to build tall
structures, as well as manuever over and around the structures it
creates. The multi-robot control allows many simultaneously active
robots to cooperate in a decentralized fashion to provably build a
user-specified structure, working from a high-level description as
input.

Funding

Movies

The video below is the complete project overview accompanying the
Science publication. You can see many videos of the TERMES
robots and simulations on our SSR YouTube channel Collective
Construction video playlist.